Day 15: What goes on in the dark forest when no one's watching?

WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS EXPLICIT BEHAVIOR OF TWO DIFFERENT COLORED BEADS PRETENDING TO BE BENGAL TIGERS IN A DARK FOREST!! YOU MUST BE MATURE ENOUGH TO HANDLE THE CONTENTS OF THIS BLOG POST TO CONTINUE READING.

Just kidding....sort of. I don't know what happened because I was told not to look.

So today was our first day back from October Break (yay...) and of course, our Honors Biology class was as boring, slow, and uneventful as ever. (I'm being sarcastic, of course. Mr. Quick, please don't make our lives any more difficult. Class is great!)

We did a lab in class that tested evolution and gene frequencies, which we called "The Tiger Lab". We had 25 red beads, which represented the recessive allele for no fur in a Bengal Tiger. We had 25 green beads that represented the dominant allele for fur. And our deep dark Indian jungle was played by a brown paper bag.

It's like you can hear the mating calls. 

In our lab, we were to put all the beads in the bag, shake it up, and pick out two beads at a time. If the bead colors were either green, green or green, red, then the tiger had the dominant allele. If the bead colors were red, red, then the tiger had the recessive allele and died.

The red beads slowly disappeared from the gene pool. In the end, the tigers all had the dominant fur allele.

And was our introduction to gene frequencies. More to come in the next post.

Until next time.